I feel your pain. My wife and I have the same situation. We Netflix alot.
Pain? What pain? I've been without cable for six years. I don't miss it. There was nothing good on when I still had it anyway.
Or watch the
Gilmore Girls full episode here:
ABC Family: Gilmore Girls 'the festival of living art', or three-minute
preview here:
www.thewb.com/shows/gilmore-girls. Now, C-Dub, you have no excuse not to watch and tell us how accurate the depiction. Don't have a TV, indeed!
Okay. I found another source for watching the episode.
Where do I start?
1 week to get ready for the show?
It takes us six months to
build the
Pageant. Yes I know their characters only actually had to come up with one new piece for their show, but even the simplest of our living pictures take a minimum of three weeks from start to finish, The set needs to be built, then prepped for painting. Cast needs to be fitted into the set. Costumes need to be made. Sets and Costumes both need to be painted. Some sets need to be wired for lighting, a process that can take anywhere from twenty minutes to a full week. And even at that there's still more to be done.
Casting a piece because the girl looks like the figure in the painting?
I'm afraid it just doesn't work that way. I suppose we could care less about whether you have the right
face for the part, but not much. Casting a piece is based solely on whether your measurements are right for a given part, with height being the primary determining factor. We'll use make-up to make your
face look right.
Recasting is easy.
It would be impossible for any member of our cast to hold a part hostage if their mother didn't get the part she wanted. We had 1200 people sign up for the show this year. We could easily find someone else to fill the part.
The Make-up Department
Cast never apply their own make-up.
Gilmore Girls had a mixture of application by others and self application. By only allowing our make-up volunteers to apply the make-up we are able to maintain a certain degree of quality control and minimize the artistic license that is often taken by performers trying to "improve" their make-up. Now to get really nit-picky, we use Stools, not chairs. And our make-up mirrors certainly do not have the standard, surrounded by light bulbs set-up.
The costumes looked good up close.:shock:
Now that's just wrong!
Costumes are supposed to look terrible up close. Everybody knows that.
The backstage experience.
Cast does not wander around backstage unless they are escorted by their assigned crew. Also, there was way too much room back
stage. Every
bit of available space should have been filled with scenery. Now I know they weren't actually trying to present something on the same scale as our show, but I did not see a single piece of scenery in the wings. Our
stage is packed to the gills with sets for the 34 to 36 pieces that we do in a typical show. In fact, we actually cannot fit the entire show in the
stage building. About a third of the show is stored in the shop building and we do a set transition at
intermission.
Was that supposed to be a painting?
While they did a reasonably good job on the
Last Supper and the statue in the gazebo, the other two pieces didn't go
flat at all and given the size of their frames, there is no way they could have. There was simply not enough room for the lighting needed to flatten the paintings. Then there was that ridiculous
platform they had their performers standing on. That beast would make transitions from one piece to the next exceedingly difficult. There's a reason why all of our scenery is on casters. It's so we can do our set transitions quickly. While one set is gonig off another is coming on.
Cast in the audience.
We do not allow our cast in the
house. They are not allowed to leave the
stage building until they have removed their costumes and make-up and are back in their street clothes. Even then, if they want to go out into the
house, they need a ticket, the same as anybody else.
So was the
Gilmore Girls episode a good representation of what we do at the
Pageant of the Masters?
No.
Was it a good representation of the art form known as
tableau vivant?
Absolutely! They gave good rendition of an
amateur tableau vivant show on a much smaller scale and certainly much less polished than what we do. We don't have exclusive rights to the art form after all. It's been around for centuries, and we've only been at it since 1933. We're the biggest, the most experienced, and the best at living pictures, but we are by no means the only group doing them.
